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Pablo_Stafforini comments on The Argument From Marginal Cases - Less Wrong Discussion

15 Post author: jkaufman 26 July 2013 01:30PM

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Comment author: Pablo_Stafforini 26 July 2013 05:12:45PM 11 points [-]

Carl Shulman:

I'm surprised. Do you mean you wouldn't trade off a dust speck in your eye (in some post-singularity future where x-risk is settled one way or another) to avert the torture of a billion frogs, or of some noticeable portion of all frogs? If we plotted your attitudes to progressively more intelligent entities, where's the discontinuity or discontinuities?

Comment author: jkaufman 28 July 2013 04:02:34AM 4 points [-]

I think frogs are extremely unlikely to have moral worth, but one dust speck vs 1B frogs is enough to overcome that improbability and I would accept the speck.

Comment author: Kawoomba 26 July 2013 05:40:59PM 1 point [-]

Always a bit awkward to argument by ways of the Sorites paradox.

Comment author: Pablo_Stafforini 27 July 2013 04:15:50PM *  2 points [-]

I would advise you to be cautious in concluding that an argument is an instance of the Sorites paradox. There is a long tradition of dismissing arguments for this reason which upon closer inspection have been found to be relevantly dissimilar to the canonical Sorites formulation. Two examples are Chalmers's "fading qualia" argument and Parfit's "psychological spectrum" argument.

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